charged freely and "sweetly," while they were slow in
healing and left disfiguring scars, usually did not give rise to serious
or fatal attacks of blood-poison or wound-fever. And of two evils they
chose the less. Plenty of pus and a big ugly scar in preference to an
attack of dangerous blood-poisoning. Even if it didn't kill you, it
might easily cripple you for life by involving a joint. The trouble was
with their logic, or rather with their premises. They were firmly
convinced that the danger came from within, that there was a sort of
morbid humor which must be allowed to escape, or it would be dammed up
in the system with disastrous results.

One day a brilliant skeptic by the name of Lister (who is still living)
took it into his head that perhaps the fathers of surgery and their
generations of imitators might have been wrong. He tried the experiment,
shut germs out of his wounds, and behold, antiseptic surgery, with all
its magnificent line of triumphs, was born!

Now a single drop of pus in an operation wound is as deep a disgrace as
a bedbug on the pillow of a model housekeeper, and calls for as vigorous
an overhauling of equipment, from cellar to skylight; while a second
drop means a commission of inquiry and a drumhead court-martial. This is
the secret of the advances of modern surgery,--not that our surgeons are
any more skillful with the knife, but that they can enter cavities like
those of the skull, the spinal cord, the abdomen, and the chest, remove
what is necessary, and get out again with almost perfect safety; whereas
these cavities were absolutely forbidden ground to their forefathers, on
account of the twenty, forty, yes, seventy per cent death risk from
suppuration and blood-poison.

The triumphs of antisepsis and asepsis, or keeping the "bugs" out of the
cuts, have been illustrated scores of times already by abler pens, and
are a household word, but certain of its practical appliances in the
wounds and scratches and trifling injuries of every-day life are not yet
so thoroughly familiar as they should be. When once we know who our
wound-enemies are, whence they came, and how they are carried, the fate
of the battle is practically in our own hands.

Like most disease-germs our wound-infection foes are literally "they of
our own household." They don't pounce down upon us from the trees, or
lie in wait for us in the thickets, or creep in the grass, or grow in
the soil, or swarm in our food. They live